Clamour Fish
by HuckingHarkness
Summary: Jack has excellent hearing. Sometimes it's just a headache. Clamour: any loud and continued noise, derives from Latin: clamo- to call, shout, cry aloud, proclaim, declare. Clamor- loud shout, cry.


**Clamour Fish**

Captain Jack Harkness was awake again. He didn't need as much sleep as everyone else, but this was getting ridiculous. The reason for his lack of sleep: A fish.

A few days ago they had logged some rift activity over the bay, but since Torchwood did not have its own boat, it had taken the team a long time to get out to the location, by which time whatever had come through was long gone, leaving no trace. They didn't even know if it had been an object or a creature.

Realising their search was futile; Jack had made the decision to keep an eye on that part of the bay, but unless something untoward happened, or there was an obvious sign of a problem, they would leave whatever had come through, to the mercy of the bay.

Lying in his bunk, after several nights of little sleep, Jack now knew what had come through. There was only one creature he knew of that could survive in the bay, and which could keep him awake with its constant, screaming.

"It's a clamour fish," Jack explained to the team later. "Clamour, which is actually Latin for 'scream', releases a very high frequency screech, when it comes into contact with salt, radiation, or oil. The frequency is so high few can hear it, but I can and it's a problem. It either means we have an overly sensitive fish, reacting to the salt content of bay water; radiation at the bottom of the sea, which we would have picked up on earlier, or an oil spill."

"I know which one I'd prefer," said Gwen.

"Anyone of them could be bad news for the city; so Ianto, can you hire out that boat we had last week and some scuba gear?" Jack asked, turning to the young man who had just delivered a round of his famous coffee.

"What if what's causing it is a load of oil drums fallen into the bay though?" Gwen enquired.

"Then we'll quite happily alert the environment agency, catch our alien fish and get the hell outta there."

"How exactly are we going to catch the clamour fish, sir?" asked Ianto.

"That's easy enough; it likes Marmite and peanut butter sandwiches."

"Eww! Are you serious? That's disgusting."

"I am not going to ask how you know that. And I hate Marmite."

"You'll love it when it works!"

"Fine, looks like I'm going shopping."

A couple of hours later and Jack, Gwen and Ianto were all clad in wetsuits and scuba gear. "You all set to go?" asked Jack, speaking through the comms in their masks. When he received the thumbs up from each of his team mates he led the way backwards into the dark water.

The skipper of the boat raised the blue and white flag and sat down to await the strange threesome's return. He was sure he hadn't met them before, yet they seemed to be very familiar with his boat; as if they had been here before…

Below the surface Jack led the way down, until they found what they were looking for. It was a small canister, with the slightest trace of radiation leaking from within the rusted casing. Ianto quickly placed the canister in a lead lined box, attached to the boat's anchor chain. They could all pull it to the surface when they got back there.

"Christ this fish is sensitive! Remind me to stick it in purified water when we get back to the hub," said Jack, feeding the creature bits of soggy sandwich.

"Ah, Jack?" Ianto waited until Jack paused, "What are we going to do once we've caught this fish?"

"I thought it could go in the hot room with all the alien fauna and flora. We need something new in there and it'll be nice to have something that doesn't try to bite, sting, and tickle or grab you."

Ianto rolled his eyes from beneath the mask, "Right," he said, watching Jack with the strange, transparent fish, moving slowly towards Gwen who held the containment box they were placing the fish in, at arms length. She didn't fancy getting too close to its rather spiky-looking fins. Jack threw the remains of the sandwich into the box and helped Gwen to seal the fish in.

"Right people, let's head back up top."

Once back at the hub Jack rigged up a system of slowly purifying the water in a fish tank, before leaving Ianto to catalogue the strange little creature. He was relieved that the screaming would cease in a couple of hours, and decided to leave the hub for a rooftop in the meantime, leaving Gwen in charge of the rift, but with strict instructions to call if anything came up.


End file.
